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Overheating coolant problems!!! LOST SO MUCH MONEY NEED HELP SOS

Hallo all,

I'm going to basically retell the events leading up to my current position. (Kinda like a story)

(P.S. My thermometer didn't work at this point)

Okay so it was a hot summer day in last Saturday and I was stuck in traffic with my 1.6 golf. Stopping and starting on a long hill between 1st and 2nd gear for quite a while. After a while of driving my coolant light turns on and my thermos was at 130 degrees. Stopped the car and there was a leak coming from one of the pipes. Drove it home eventually without it overheating.

I took the car the workshop and they replaced the thermostat housing (apparently leaking, didn't seem in bad shape when I saw it personally) and the engine fan (apparently the fan wasn't running). While driving home the coolant light switched on again, called the mechanic, said it must be an air pocket, after bleeding all the air the light still came on after some driving plus overheating. The mechanic claims it must be a water pump problem, fixing things by elimination is a process I guess, an expensive one to say the least.

I was hoping that the problem would somehow disappear and that it would just be temperamental.

With that in mind I drove it about 100km today, the first half of the journey the temperature would rise quite dramatically but not to 130 degrees then go down back to 90 degrees. Eventually the light came back on. What I learnt from driving it then was that as I increased the speed past about 60kmph the temperature would climb gradually to the 130 degree mark, slowing down the car could cool down a bit. But past a certain point the car would have to be turned off to start cooling down.

I'm dubious If this is a water pump problem because I read somewhere that a way of diagnosing that if it was the water pump would be that it gets hot when idling but cools down once accelerating.

The radiator is cold when running and the pipe which runs into it is HOT, I'm not too sure what he said but one of the pipes which runs through the water pump is cold after running. That points to a water pump problem right?

I'm going to have to do this job myself so I can have something for my 18th, I know the water pump is a ***** to replace, so I'm trying to reach out to y'all for opinions and possibly a solution.

That's how my toast water pump made my coolant temps behave in my mk3.
At 60 temp would be 100, 80km/h it would be 110deg, 100km/h = 120deg etc.
When I pulled the pump no fins were left. I believe the aux water pump and pressure from changing temps was all that was pushing the water around the system.
If the pump hasn't been replaced before it could be worth doing along with a timing belt